Ilana Mercer, October 4, 2013

The message that greeted future Obamacare patients who logged on to Healthcare.gov was as follows: “Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

Healthcare.gov is the deluxe version of Obamacare.

The interminable waits on Healthcare.gov are a harbinger of things to come under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This so-called “Health Insurance Marketplace” is using the good name of the marketplace in vain. A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy. As such, they will result in long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of central planners to bring demand and supply into balance.

Like Canadian, Cuban and British nationalized healthcare, Obamacare’s motto will become, “We have boatloads of patients, too few doctors, supplies and equipment and not nearly enough of your money. Don’t like it? Go jump in the lake.”

Like me, you must know Obama-heads (doctors included) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by Obama’s politburo of proctologists—a modest expansion totaling $2 trillion—would cost them anything at all. (Doctors for Obamacare ought to revel in the 140,000 added codes into which they’ll have to categorize care rendered. These include nine new codes for injuries sustained from the common macaw! You’re more likely to be felled by an Obama-guided drone than by that gentle hook bill.)

I’m already feeling the care. How about you?

Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. Before Obamacare, this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Obamacare became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how to continue caring for us under current conditions (and keep operating).

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It has already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

Perhaps like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself. In this case, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has more bad news. On the individual-market, “Obamacare will increase average … insurance premiums by 99% for men, 62% for Women.” Middle-class Americans Obamacare subsidies will not protect. They “face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies.”

Well before Roy, a healthcare expert had warned John Stossel’s viewers that the employer mandate forces every employer of more than 50 workers (insurers are employers) to provide them with a one-size fits all government-designed plan. The costs of the employer mandate are such that it’s economically more viable for a proprietor to deny coverage and pay a penalty, considering that compliance will add about $1.75 per hour to the cost of a worker and may see a business go under.

Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires. An additional $1.75 an hour doesn’t much matter when one is hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high; this is a proposition only government can entertain, given that it derives its revenue from taxing, borrowing and minting money.

Not even CNN’s resident physician, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, can doctor the reports any longer. Sad to say, but across the country people have been reporting what Gupta admitted only yesterday. Those who had full-time employment and healthcare insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed bereft of a job and insurance.

Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.

This same belief plagues the simple-minded pinkos at Politico.com, where two female reporters gushed that “[d]espite the unceasing GOP campaign to sink the law, Obamacare has exceeded expectations in some significant ways.” The gush and tosh was over the fact that the central planner had instructed insurers on how to “better” allocate resources, forcing them “to issue more than $500 million in rebate checks to consumers because they failed to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care.”

Another tenet of this prevailing worldview is that an act of force—a law—is all it takes to make medical manna fall from the heavens.

In April came news that Big Brother will be appointing “navigators” to show the beneficiaries of the bankrupting Affordable Care Act the way: 21,000 navigators in California alone translates into 140,000 of them nationwide, a bureaucratic army that will swell the already swollen federal oink sector. By Pat Buchanan’s telling, navigator pay will run from $20 to $48 an hour, almost $100,000 a year for one federal oinker, for a total of between $5 and 10 billion. In California alone navigators will cost between $871 million and $2 billion a year.

These navigators will likely be members if the entrenched minorities who speak the languages of the welfariat for which Obamacare has been sculpted. Since the chosen workers will be Obama’s pepes—community organizers, union folks and Planned Parenthood advisers—recruiting new Democrats will be part of their job description.

Despotism is upon us when, as one wag put it, “government officials write laws that apply only to us and not to them.” Lawmakers and staff were supposed to have lost their generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to be replaced by health insurance purchased at the comically calamitous Healthcare.gov.

The proctologist-in-chief caved to the squealing quislings. The 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of their Capitol Hill staff will still retain the subsidies provided by taxpayer largess. Obamacare for thee, but not for me.